The Future of Black Politics
People who live at the bottom of the social order, especially at the bottom of more than one of its hierarchies, are frequently condemned to a life of crippling disadvantage. The existence of such mutually reinforcing power hierarchies calls the social order itself into question as a matter of justice. Political movements need to disrupt these hierarchies to overcome injustice.
In the United States, a healthy black politics is indispensable to that task. Black politics—African Americans’ ability to mobilize, influence policy, demand accountability from government officials, participate in American political discourse, and ultimately offer a democratic alternative to the status quo—have at times formed the leading edge of American democratic and progressive movements; black visions were some of the more robust, egalitarian, and expansive American democratic visions. This status has been lost.
The decline of progressive black politics is apparent in the Occupy actions that have swept the country to protest economic injustice. There has been black participation, and in some areas, such as Chicago, black efforts to mobilize communities have been aided by the presence of a local Occupy movement. But, for the most part, Occupy has been divorced from black politics.
Yet both today’s black communities and black political traditions have much to offer Occupy and progressives at large. Blacks are more supportive than any other group of Americans of state action to redistribute wealth and bring about a more equal and just society. A National Journal poll released last October found that 84 percent of blacks support a surtax on people earning more than $1 million per year, compared to 68 percent support overall. They are also the strongest opponents of U.S. military intervention: blacks opposed the 2003 intervention in Iraq at far higher rates than did any other group, including Democrats. Black progressive traditions have long offered a more just and democratic vision than is usually found in American political discourse. Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey, William Monroe Trotter, Hubert Harrison, A. Philip Randolph, Cyril Briggs, and W. E. B. Du Bois are just a few of the many activist-theoreticians (they tended to be both) who led movements dedicated to fighting for racial justice and in most cases offered a broad vision of social and economic justice as well.
Today there is a disconnect between black organizing and other mobilizations on behalf of labor, suffrage, and radical economic reform. Even worse, the black civil society that in the past supported flourishing black activism is today weaker than it was for most of the twentieth century. Without a mobilized black politics, American democracy is even more vulnerable to internal attacks by those who have been openly suspicious of mass democratic movements for decades.
The lack of a black political movement also feeds into the view, popular among some Americans, that we live in a post-racial society. But our apparent post-racial order, signified by President Obama’s election and inauguration, is an illusion. The black poor, if anything, find themselves in conditions of greater deprivation now than at any time in the recent past. Racial inequality remains a brute fact of life in this country. The interracial political unity that is supposed to herald a truly post-racial society also does not exist. Blacks and whites remain bitterly divided in their political beliefs. This political division has led to desperation and anger in many black communities.
And that anger and throttling despair have replaced the insurgent forces of the civil rights era—insurgent because the change these forces sought was nothing less than transformative.